Gil Shaham often tells his children to take risks, try new things and not be afraid of making mistakes. But the renowned violinist realized a few years ago that he had not done a very good job of following his own advice, so he decided to break out of his comfort zone and develop an innovative twenty-first-century way to present Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin (BWV 1001-1006).

“I think of this as a little bit of maybe practicing what I preach,” he said.

Shaham teamed with New York video artist David Michalek, who has created a group of short films to be projected on a screen behind the violinist as he performs the six works. The resulting multimedia collaboration will make its debut during a national tour timed to coincide with the 10 March 2015 release of Shaham’s recording of the complete Bach set on his Canary Classics label. The tour began 1 March 2015 in Chicago as part of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s Symphony Center Presents series, continues in late March in California, and concludes 23 April 2015 with a performance at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

“I hope people come to see it with an open mind,” Shaham said. “Some of the images will surprise people. Some might shock people. But I found them to be mesmerizing and beautiful and very, very musical.”

Michalek has gained international attention for his multifaceted body of work, which includes large-scale outdoor installations, in which he projects super slow-motion films on giant screens. These projects have been shown in such high-visibility sites as Lincoln Center, Trafalgar Square, and Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin. Among the best-known such works is Slow Dancing, which consists of forty-three video portraits of dancers and choreographers from around the world. Each subject was filmed using a high-speed, high-definition camera that records one thousand frames per second compared to the standard thirty frames. Because the resulting videos last ten minutes but show only five seconds of action, the movement is barely perceptible.

The artist has continued his extreme slow-motion techniques for this project, finding thematic links to Bach’s works without trying to specifically interpret them. The challenge was to create images for music never intended for such purpose and to make sure the two mediums complemented each other. Michalek asked himself such questions as: “What does it mean to couple this kind of pure music with an image? What can an image do? What can it do advantageously? What can it do problematically?”

Some experts believe the three pairs of sonatas and partitas relate to the New Testament stories of Christ’s Nativity, Passion, and Resurrection. Rather than attempting to directly depict the first of those, for example, Michalek chose to suggest new life by filming a budding six-year-old violinist playing her instrument, zeroing in on her face and tiny fingers. “That’s all it is,” he said. “That’s the image. So, while we hear Gil onstage, playing the heights of violin music, we see a little being on screen holding the same instrument.” For another section, he created a kind of filmed still life, with a crystal ball, skull, and just the movement of sand slowing dropping through an hourglass.

Like Bach’s six Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12), the composer’s 1720 works for solo violin are considered among the most profound and expressive statements ever written for the instrument. Out of respect, Shaham postponed taking them on until about ten years ago, when he finally began performing them in public. “And then I learned what so many other musicians have said before – that there is really no greater joy than playing Bach,” he said. “When I go to my practice room, I’ll start practicing, and the time will just pass. Suddenly, it’s two hours later.”

As part of his activities while serving as the 2013-14 artist-in-residence with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, he performed Bach’s solo violin works as part of three chamber-music programs. Because the ensemble is one of two orchestras that operate under the auspices of the Bayerischer Rundfunk, Shaham decided to take advantage of its easily accessible recording studios and engineers to record the set last summer. “It seemed like a good moment to do it,” he said.

The album will be the fourteenth release by Canary Classics, the label Shaham founded in 2003 as a way to have the freedom to record what he wanted without the commercial pressures associated with larger labels. It has since issued recordings featuring the violinist’s sister, pianist Orli Shaham, and his wife, violinist Adele Anthony. “It’s sort of a small family business,” the violinist said. The label was begun with a simple business plan: use the proceeds from the last recording used to pay for the next. “I feel very lucky that so far we’ve been able to do that.”

A big surprise for the violinist’s longtime fans is that he has brought a lighter-sounding, period-performance approach to his playing of the Bach solo Sonatas and Partitas. “I feel like now is probably the most rewarding time ever to be studying Bach, to be playing Bach, to be listening to Bach, because we have had so much research about it, and so, for example, I love the recordings of (Dutch conductor) Ton Koopman (and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra) of the Orchestral Suites (BWV 1066-8). So, I began experimenting. I guess it’s part of my mid-life crisis.”

To play these works, he reconfigures his 1699 Stradivarius with a baroque-style bridge made by New York luthier Adam Crane and gut instead of the usual steel strings, and he employs a Baroque-style bow commissioned from New York bow maker Markus Laine. At the same time, Shaham has incorporated such period-performance practices as less vibrato and faster tempos. “Some people have been surprised at my tempi, and I understand that. I certainly am playing much of this music faster than I used to, and I’m convinced for now that I’m happier with it.”

As he delved into Bach’s solo Sonatas and Partitas, Shaham said the spirit of experimentation in the music rubbed off on him and he began thinking about possible new ways to present this music. He realized today’s audiences do not understand many of the cultural references that would have come naturally for Bach’s contemporaries, such as what a bourrée is and how the music for it sounds.

So he wanted to provide new entry points into these works for twenty-first-century audiences. That’s when he thought of Michalek’s installation, Slow Dancing, which he saw in the Lincoln Center Plaza in 2007 and realized might be just the vehicle he was looking for. “I thought the way he shot his films was so beautiful, and especially the way he used time, the play with light and time, and I thought that could easily lend itself to music.”

The two first met at Café Luxembourg, near Lincoln Center, and quickly hit it off. It helped that Michalek was a fan of Bach and owned several recordings of the solo violin works. They later got together for further discussion at Michalek’s apartment, with the two of them sitting on the floor of the artist’s little library – Shaham breaking down the structure of the sonatas and partitas and playing examples on his violin, and Michalek showing excerpts from his other works. Soon their collaboration was firmly under way.

As an outgrowth of projects like Slow Dancing, Michalek does commissioned family portraits using a similar slow-motion technology. One day, he visited a client’s house, where one of his filmed diptychs of boys ages six and eight happened to be running at the same time that a recording of cellist Yo-Yo Ma playing a Bach solo suite was playing. To the artist, it appeared that the boys were having a response to the music he was hearing, and watching them and listening at the same time enhanced his appreciation of the music.

“It didn’t seem to damage to music,” he said. “It didn’t seem to fight with it. It was just a very simple mechanism that allowed me to get into a sort of state of active listening that I could sustain. Not that I can’t sustain it without the image. But it helped me do it differently, and I thought, ‘Well, maybe this is a way in.’”

Michalek set about creating short slow-motion videos to accompany each section of the six Bach works. The high-definition videos will be projected behind Shaham on screens that will vary in size depending on the venues where he performs. Michalek’s technical director will travel with the violinist and oversee the presentation of the visual imagery, which has to be manually queued to the duration of the violinist’s playing.

In all, the artist shot more than two hundred fifty takes, and he spent recent weeks deciding on which ones to include in the work. Shaham finally had a chance to see the final product earlier this week, and he called it stunning. “I feel very honored to be part of David’s vision in this project,” he said. “I think it’s a testament to Bach that the power of his music transcends centuries and cultures and mediums and inspires people.”

Hip-hop is always hungry. Like the katamari of video game fame or the doubly insatiable hippos of the childhood tabletop game, hip-hop music and culture has absorbed (and remixed and made its own) every genre that it touches. From when it was born on the streets of New York City in the 1970s, hip-hop has taken in the bass lines of funk, the vocals of R&B, the epic scale of rock, the improvisation of jazz, and the dancey jams of pop. So why not classical music?

That’s the question that the world premiere commission Outside the Bachx, promoted as a mix of classical music and hip-hop, is supposed to ask. But in reality Outside the Bachx is a hip-hop show, displaying admirable talents of breakdancing, beatboxing, DJing, song, and slam poetry which all just happen to occupy a space with a grand piano that gets played on occasion.

The story of the piece, as fleeting as its inexpertly pumped theatrical haze, tells of a rental rehearsal space shared in successive time slots by a classical pianist and a breakdancing group, who come into conflict over sharing that space, but eventually realize the fun of collaboration. The trouble is that while the piece finishes with the promised unification of the classical and hip-hop genres, the audience spends fifty minutes of the sixty minute runtime taking in scattered, though technically adept, vignettes oriented toward either hip-hop or classical music. It was like ordering a martini at a bar and only being served a glass of gin, a glass of vermouth, and an expectant look from the bartender.

But the moments that those separate elements get mixed are elevating. The finale of Outside the Bachx combines classical music and ballet beautifully with hip-hop, artfully and correctly adapting classical motifs into true combination. Another high point comes in the middle of the show, when classic Asian pentatonics and martial arts inspire hip-hop dance, though, as the two Asian actors participating in this number point out, they are Japanese and Filipino, while the music comes from China.

Outside the Bachx is admirable in its attempt to show the inclusivity of hip-hop with an ensemble of Latino, Asian, Black and White actors, but the approach to diversity is strained. The play often resorts to stereotyping to express that diversity: the Asian cast members mentioned above, Gene Shinozaki and John Vinuya, use martial arts in their dance, and the text of Gabriel Alvarez, a Dominican cast member, is all about macho bravado. I wish, especially in a show marketed for young audiences, that stereotyping could have been left by the wayside.

The show is part of the Kennedy Center’s Theater for Young Audiences. There’s no swearing, violence, or overt sexuality anywhere in the piece. By a different token though, the Outside the Bachx is held back by what seems to be an oversimplification of story and character development, both of which are shallow to the point of nonexistence. To be fair, the architecture of the Family Theater doesn’t do the staging, done by cast members Gabriel Dionisio and Ana Garcia, any favors. What may have worked in a more intimate configuration as an encompassing expression of hip-hop style feels dulled and unenergetic on a proscenium stage.

But the problem runs deeper than that. Outside the Bachx feels dumbed and watered down for the young audiences it targets. While it has the ingredients that people who don’t know young audiences expect to be winners (flashy lights, loud music, acrobatic dancing), it lacks what young people really crave: good storytelling. Just ask the kids seated all around me who began the squirming burble of boredom not fifteen minutes into the show. Give the kids some credit (I think they’re tougher critics than me), focus on telling one good story first and then worry about the flash later.

All of these criticisms have one theme: the execution of dance and poetry and song in this play were strong, but the fundamental text and storytelling lacked cohesiveness and punch. That’s an issue in the writing, also done by Dionisio and Garcia, who may have taken on too much as directors, writers, and choreographers of Outside the Bachx.

This weekend’s Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts (beginning on Thursday, 19 February 2015, conducted by Stéphane Denève) include the stylized jazz of Darius Milhaud‘s score for the 1923 ballet La création du monde. Commissioned by the Ballets Suédois, a short-lived rival to the more famous Ballets Russes, La création du monde joined a long line of artworks and spectacles in which European artists leveraged the perceived frisson of non-European cultures. Africa inspired La création du monde: writer Blaise Cendrars fashioned a scenario from African creation myths he collected for his Anthologie nègre; artist Fernand Léger based his set and costume designs on African sculpture. The goal was less authenticity than shock. (Milhaud recalled Léger rejecting designs because they were “too bright and ‘pretty-pretty.’”)

Milhaud brought jazz into the mix. He missed the first Parisian vogue for jazz (he was in Brazil, serving as secretary to the French ambassador, playwright Paul Claudel), but was smitten after hearing it in London; he later traveled to New York and visited jazz clubs in Harlem. Jazzy touches were already commonplace back in Paris, but Milhaud wanted something closer to the source. He favored the tumult of the improvisation he heard in Harlem over the tightly arranged stylings of the largely white bands that played in Europe; La création du monde is fully composed, but its Baroque-inspired prelude-and-fugue form was designed to capture jazz’s contrapuntal frenzy. Milhaud was determined to get the sound right, limiting the strings to single players – letting winds, piano, and percussion dominate – and prominently featuring the saxophone, its tone (as Milhaud described it) “squeezing the juice out of dreams.”

The score also preserves a fluid moment in the history of art. As the twentieth century progressed, modernism and popular culture became adversaries, but, at the time of La création du monde, modernists could engage with pop on terms that were equal parts celebration and sabotage. Milhaud’s music pushes against both sides: the orchestra sounds like a jazz band, the jazz band plays like Bach, Bach underpins a pagan ritual, the ritual fuels Parisian fashion. Every element tries to reshape every other by force of collision. (Not incidentally, La création du monde premiered on a double bill with Within the Quota, scored by Cole Porter.)

The revolution didn’t pan out – commercial forces commodified jazz, cosseted classical music into plush escapism, and ensured a long estrangement between pop and the avant-garde. But La création du monde still shouts an objection with atypical style.

The Trocks were in Calgary on the weekend for two sold-out performances at the Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium Friday and Saturday night. Hosted by Alberta Ballet, there could be no doubt of the popularity of the all-male ballet company, now in their fortieth anniversary season, as they so completely delighted their audience while dancing in tutus and pointe shoes, equally comfortably as in full ballet cavalier.

Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo are not exactly the mad satirists of ballet that some claim. They are the best kind of artful parodists, capable of illuminating the most gripping sections of academic classical ballet, albeit via a wink and smile and the occasional well-placed shtick.

Despite the fact that such an international reputation precedes them, there were times when the ensemble took long breaks from their perfectly deranged, yet nuanced self-mocking humor, to bedazzle with a stunning virtuosity that I frankly can’t understand, at a physical level, just quite how they pulled it off. From every pirouette, fouetté, brisé, and stock classical ballet moment that would clearly have been meant for women to dance, they acquitted each movement with such aplomb, it made my body hurt just to watch them. I couldn’t imagine getting myself to do that for any sustained amount of time.

While several people at intermission could be heard to exclaim that their faces hurt from laughing so hard, for me it was my core that hurt the most, from marveling at how hard – very hard – it was for each of them, from a feather-shedding Dying Swan to swan diving, to pull off such refined moves. For a man to dance like a woman is a truly difficult role to train for – both extraordinarily fun and extraordinarily difficult at the same time.

The Trocks are unspeakably talented, and there were times, many times, that their lines and execution could make you forget that these were not women, but men performing, and that captivated me more than their equally successful, wonderful humor.

Moving past dancing en pointe, which is hard enough for a man, I was impressed with their ensemble work in Go for Barocco set to Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto no. 3 in G Major (BWV 1048), a parody of Balanchine’s Concerto Barocco set to Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins in D minor (BWV 1043). It is hard enough to dance to intricate counterpoint, but the Trocks’ Third Movement fugue was enthralling. At the same time, while the tribute to Balanchine was meticulously pulled off with an enviable poise that made the evening thoroughly enjoyable for me, I loved the mocking description of the dance found in the program, a perfect parody of academic and old-world journalese employed by critics, characterizing the work as a “primer in identifying stark coolness and choreosymphonic delineation on the new (neo) neo-new classic dance.”

That twisted language describes many of the Trocks’ best moments in their signature hit Swan Lake, Act II. It was a great way to lead off the show, stealing everyone’s hearts right away, while at the same time leading us through not only standard-bearer classical balletic language but also highlighting what that language is all about through a healthy degree of wit and charm. Occasionally, the show could devolve for a few seconds into slapstick, to the delight of many, such as an unwitting leg extension impacting an apparently unsuspecting member of the corps, and knocking him (her) momentarily unconscious. Or, sometimes a few tutued swans would fall out of line, or just on the floor, from a little too much enthusiasm. The Trocks ended their presentation with astounding scenes based on Petipa’s Paquita, set to a stunning set of five unforgettable variations.

I realize I haven’t mentioned any names of the touring company, but in a way, their male and female aliases seem to be serious projected alter egos, blurring the dancers’ individual and collective identities. After a while, I wasn’t sure I could tell male from female, or parodistic pillory from serious artistic travesti. And at the end of the show, during the thunderous applause, all I knew was that behind the humor there were very always beautiful and aesthetically moving experiences, not too far hidden beneath the Trocks’ carefully concealed dual artistic identities of truth and travesty. Bravo!

For some five centuries the trio has been the true test of an organist. The mode of playing in which each hand takes a single voice while the feet are responsible for the bass line had already enjoyed a long history before the 1720s when Johann Sebastian Bach set about revolutionizing the genre. The early modern German masters of organ polyphony, chief among them the blind virtuoso Arnolt Schlick, honed their virtuosity in three-part textures interweaving independent lines; in contrast to the sometimes overwhelming effect of their more expansive polyphonic experiments of six (or more) parts, the trio produced a contrapuntal fabric whose clarity not only allowed for the expression of nuance, but also exposed the slightest technical or musical weakness in the performer.

Schlick and has contemporaries had treated the organ trio largely as if it were a vocal piece, with little crossing of the voices and only short bursts of figuration or ornament. Bach almost certainly knew none of the trios of Schlick’s generation, although he was acquainted with numerous seventeenth-century examples of three-part writing at the organ, likewise derived essentially from vocal models. But Bach’s trios bear only a distant relation to their precursors, instead meeting, and often surpassing, the technical demands of contemporary ensemble trio sonatas of his time. Using all four limbs, one virtuosic organist had to do the duties of three instrumental virtuosos.

The organ was the ultimate tool for such an undertaking. The central German instruments known to Bach were equipped with an array of registers that imitated contemporary strings and woodwinds. In Bach’s trios each hand was assigned to a separate keyboard and therefore a distinct sound, while the feet had yet another in the pedal. The treble lines might be rendered as if on oboe and violin, or as a pair of complementary flutes above the bass, or in any number of combinations from the endless possibilities offered by Bach’s organs.

With the aid of such a palette of colors, Bach could make the trio sing. But he could also make it dance. His trios were as much physical as musical: the organist’s entire body had to be attuned to the pathos and sweetness of adagios and the insouciant athleticism of allegros. This physicality was a crucial part of Bach’s musical identity, and contemporaries and students praised the speed and accuracy of his feet, either alone, or with his hands. His obituary published in 1754 – a document whose title described the deceased expressly as “A World Famous Organist” – claimed that, “With his two feet, [Bach] could play things on the pedals that many not unskillful clavier players would find it bitter enough to have to play with five fingers.” The essential feature of German organ playing was the independence required of hands and feet, in contrast to the mostly supportive underpinning provided by the pedals of other European traditions. This independence was exposed at its most relentless and most refined in Bach’s trios.

The main sources for the six Trio Sonatas (BWV 525-530) are two manuscripts stemming from the Bach family: an autograph copy probably made around 1727; and another copy in the hand of Anna Magdalena Bach, later divided and the missing section then re-copied by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach. These manuscripts suggest just how important the trios were in the musical life of the Bach family and Bach’s students, not least in the formation of one of the greatest organists of the next generation – Bach’s first son, Wilhelm Friedemann. After J. S. Bach’s death, the organ trios were held up as the ultimate test of true organ playing. In the list of organ works in Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s 1802 Bach biography, a work that relied largely on information gathered from Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and Wilhelm Friedemann, the trios “for two claviers and obbligato pedals” come as the final entry, and the prime carrier of Bach’s musical and familial legacy: “Bach composed [the trios] for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, who, by practicing them, had to prepare himself to become the great performer on the organ that he afterward was. It is impossible to say enough of their beauty. They were composed when the author was in his most mature age and may be considered as his chief work of this description.” A later eighteenth-century history of Leipzig’s Thomasschule praised Bach as the greatest organist of his day and described Wilhelm Friedemann as the son who inherited the organ art most directly. The account goes on to claim that Bach’s organ music “surpassed all that had previously been written for the instrument.” The trios were the clearest expression of a technique that demanded unwavering independence: “the left hand had to be as capable as the right, and he treated the pedal as its own voice.” Other Bach devotees praised the timeless modernity of the trios; some three decades after his father’s death C. P. E. Bach asserted that the trios “are written in such galant style that they still sound very good, and never grow old, but on the contrary will outlive all revolutions of fashion in music.” For C. P. E. Bach the collection was the crowning proof of the pedal’s importance in organ playing.

But for all their galant finesse, there are pitfalls at every turn and the slightest hitch will be noticed. Things can go immediately and irrevocably wrong as in no other genre: it is impossible to fake your way through a trio sonata movement.

None of this is to gainsay the impact and difficulty of Bach’s great preludes and fugues. Because my performance of the six sonatas had to be divided between two CDs, I took the opportunity to enclose each of the two sets of three sonatas with one of Bach’s monumental free works. Bach himself adopted this conceit at least once, framing the magisterial collection of chorale preludes of the Clavierübung III (1739) with the Prelude and Fugue in E-flat Major (BWV 552). Bach would certainly not have minded that work’s removal from its original published context so that the prelude could introduce the first trio sonata (BWV 525) in the same key, and the fugue provide an apocalyptic peroration after the sprightly last movement of the D-minor sonata (BWV 527).

When considered in light of Bach’s vaunted (and sometimes vilified) taste for harmonic and contrapuntal complexity, the six sonatas are not especially rich in chromaticism or shocking intervallic relations. There are unforgettable exceptions: among the most arresting is the stabbing angularity of the second fugal theme in the third movement of the C minor Sonata (BWV 526/3); and the half-steps descending amidst arabesques at the close of the middle movement of the final sonata (BWV 530/2). The generally diatonic harmonic approach (even if inflected with many unexpected Bachian turns and twists) and the cantabile profile of the themes led C. P. E. Bach to cherish the collection’s galant refinement.

Any deficiencies in the Bachian diet of chromaticism are made up for with the Prelude and Fugue in E minor (BWV 548); the prelude establishes the key of the ensuing sonata in E minor (BWV 528), and the fugue offers a sprawling coda after the final movement, a bright fugal frolic, of the last sonata in G Major (BWV 530). The angular chromaticism of the subject of the great “Wedge” fugue is itself singular: thrillingly transgressive, the piece is not a retreat from fashion and favor but a challenge to both. Heard against such sublime experiments, the trio sonatas can hardly be accused of pandering to prevailing fashion but instead show that the task of training organists in the art of four-limbed performance can be, in Bach’s hands and feet, a tremendously imaginative and challenging exercise in gracefulness and poise, both musical and physical.

Bach features strongly in this Festival. His Suites for Unaccompanied Violoncello (BWV 1007-12) are performed by the world-renowned Sigiswald Kuijken on a violoncello da spalla, and his Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) by local pianist Joanne Camilleon. The European Union Baroque Ensemble will perform music by Handel and his London friends, and the Festival’s resident ensemble, the Valletta International Baroque Ensemble, will perform at two concerts.

The Festival also includes events specifically for children and culminates with the Baroque Festival Ball to be held in Teatru Manoel on Saturday, 24 January 2015.

It’s not very often that one receives international recognition two hundred fifty years after being placed in the ground. But with help from University of Wisconsin-Madison musicology professor Charles Dill and a host of international scholars and musicians, that’s exactly what’s happening for Jean-Philippe Rameau.

Rameau, a French composer (1683-1764) who lived during the reign of Louis XV, has become famous for his contributions to music theory, his early harpsichord works, and especially his operas. His 1722 Treatise on Harmonyis considered revolutionary for having incorporated philosophical ideas alongside practical musical issues. His operas were equally famous for their rich choral singing and elegant dancing. In the last few decades, interest in Rameau has intensified, with French scholars leading the way and organizing major festivals in Europe. Because of Dill’s renown as a scholar of Rameau and the Baroque, the UW-Madison School of Music will present a series of performances and talks about Rameau during the 2014-2015 academic year.

On 13 November 2014, the first of these events will kick off with a discussion about the expressive qualities in Rameau’s music (with visiting opera director David Ronis and Professor Anne Vila of the Department of French and Italian), followed by a concert the next day featuring Marc Vallon, UW-Madison professor of bassoon, in a mostly-Rameau concert. You can read the full schedule of events here.

We asked Prof. Dill to tell us a bit about himself and what makes Rameau an important figure in music.

University of Wisconsin-Madison (UWM) How did you first become interested in Rameau?

Charles Dill (CD) Modern audiences often view all composers of the past as struggling visionaries. This may be true of composers after Beethoven, but it isn’t true – or isn’t true in the same way – for earlier composers, even composers like Mozart or Haydn. They considered themselves to be working at a job. They wrote pieces to suit their performers, and the compositions were “disposable.” If something needed changing, the composer changed it, generally without much grumbling. They didn’t continue to garner attention for decades.

What first interested me about Rameau, then, was that he revised his operas extensively and these revised versions continued to be performed. This suggests all sorts of remarkable things about him and his works. Notably, he was alert to how audiences responded to his works to an unusual degree, and he felt some kind of obligation toward “getting the work right,” as it were. That’s a very modern way of thinking about music. Because of this attitude, he also took risks as a composer. He was a remarkably creative individual, and he was rewarded for it. His works dominated French opera for a period of fifty years, until well after his death. For his time and place, this truly was an unusual relationship between composer and audience.

Add to that Rameau’s work as a theorist. Thinkers had been speculating about how music works for as long as music had existed, but Rameau was the first to envision a comprehensive system that accounted for all of its aspects: how keys or tonalities come into being, why some harmonic progressions are more effective than others, how musical knowledge influences performance. We still employ his basic terminology for describing fundamental principles of music – chord inversion, tonic, dominant. There were flaws in his ideas, to be sure, and there have been countless other systems proposed since that make similar claims, but if you imagine music as an organized, coherent system – something we do every day – then you are, to a degree, following in his footsteps.

CD I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. When I began working in Parisian libraries in the late 1980s, as a graduate student completing my degree, there were only a handful of people studying Rameau. Students from that generation have done influential work. Thomas Christensen explained the development of Rameau’s music theory, Sylvie Bouissou became the general editor of the Rameau edition, and William Christie specialized in interpreting Rameau’s music in performance.

I was interested in Rameau’s relationship with audiences. Music criticism was still a fledgling enterprise in the eighteenth century, and yet his compositions elicited strong opinions, both for and against. He was one of the first composers to be treated not simply as a commodity, but as a public figure, one of the first to take that role seriously. To an unusual degree, he felt the need to experiment in his compositions, and yet he was also forced by circumstances to consider listeners and their perceptions in everything he wrote. After all this time, I still find this story remarkable.

Times have changed. Nowadays, France recognizes Rameau as one its most representative composers and devotes time, money, and effort to developing our knowledge of him. A small army of dedicated French researchers is poring over every available source and producing first-rate scholarship. They’re doing wonderful work.

UWM What contributions have you made to scholarship?

CD When I began writing about Rameau, there was a longstanding trend to approach composers solely from the vantage point of what they wrote. We could describe this as the “great composers” or “great works” approach. Discussing composers in this way cuts out some of the most interesting material: what audiences believed, how they liked what they heard, how they received the composers, and how composers responded to criticism. My book, Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition (1998), which Princeton University Press has recently reprinted as part of its Legacy series, addressed some of these questions. As an eminently public figure, Rameau was subject to intense scrutiny. Some critics distrusted opera as an overly sensual medium, and some regarded Rameau’s colorful music as an especially egregious example. Rameau encouraged these kinds of responses. Where earlier composers generally wrote simple, unobtrusive music, Rameau wrote music that demanded attention. In a way, then, he challenged critics and audience members to define their expectations regarding music openly and publicly. It is telling that, during the period in which he became popular, audiences changed, coming to resemble modern audiences more and more: they began to learn difficult and complex music by heart, they grew more quiet and became more attentive during performances.

My other contributions have had to do with aspects of his career. My early publications often dealt with the relationship between Rameau’s ideas as a music theorist and his actual compositions. Having an eighteenth-century composer who was so active on both fronts is truly unusual, and it allows us to think more carefully about the relationship between theory and practice. More recently, I’ve been interested in reconstructing Rameau’s intellectual life. He was a bit of a magpie, really, taking ideas from the writers and philosophers who most suited his needs, but given the time and place in which he lived, he could take from the best: Descartes and Malebranche were early sources of inspiration, but eventually, like so many of his contemporaries, he turned his attention to Locke. Among those who collaborated with him on projects were Voltaire, Diderot, and d’Alembert. So I’ve been developing a clearer sense of what he himself actually believed, based on what he drew on from these various sources.”

UWM How does Rameau fit in with other well-known composers of the day?

CD Rameau was two years older than Handel and Bach, almost an exact contemporary. Interestingly, although there’s no evidence to suggest he knew their music well, he helped popularize in France the kinds of music they were writing. From the Handel side of things, he took the kind of virtuosic playing and singing we associate with Italian composition, and from the Bach side, he took an interest in complex counterpuntal and harmonic language. To these he added an extraordinary sense of color – few at this time were combining orchestras and voices in such surprising ways – and an endless gift for invention comparable to Bach’s and Handel’s. During the late 1740s, a faction arose at the French court that wanted to set limits on how many operas Rameau could compose, because they felt he was dominating the music scene so completely.

Rameau was well known internationally. Initially, this was the result of his theoretical ideas, which he began publishing in the 1720s; reviews appeared almost immediately in Germany. By the 1750s, when his theoretical ideas were being popularized, his work was receiving attention in Italy as well. He also became an international figure musically in this period. His works were performed in Italy and Germany, and they were influential among the reform composers of that generation – Traetta, Jommelli, and Gluck. (For example, the famous opening scene of Gluck’s Orfeo et Euridice, which begins in the midst of a funeral procession, was directly modeled on the beginning of Rameau’s Castor et Pollux.)

UWM What activities have taken place around the world this year, and where?

CD Well, as is always the case with composers, there have been performances around the world – in France and, more generally, Europe, obviously, but in the states as well, notably in New York and Washington, D. C. In fact, a phone app has circulated in France so that one can follow where Rameau is being performed every day this year.

Raphaëlle Legrand, who teaches at the Sorbonne, has put together a fascinating year-long series of presentations, open to the public, that combine historians, music theorists, professional musicians specializing in period instruments, and professional dancers specializing in historical dance techniques. This project is called the “Atelier Rameau” and it has an excellent website. It has been especially interesting to have singers, instrumentalists, and dancers working together, because dance is so basic to Rameau’s musical style. Performers quickly developed a new sense of what was and wasn’t possible when they began talking to each other!

Among the surprises, those in attendance learned that we are still discovering eighteenth-century production scores for Rameau’s earliest and most important works, and that Rameau was the composer of the famous round, Frère Jacques, which he included in a recently discovered composition manual. I can honestly say that this past year has advanced our knowledge of Rameau and his music in unprecedented ways.

Mick Eve, sax player for Georgie Fame’s Blue Flames, was mooching around the musical instrument shops in London’s Denmark Street as one did in 1966. His friend Chas Chandler, whom Mick had known as bassist for the Animals but who had recently returned from a talent-fishing trip to America, ran out of a guitar store and said excitedly in broad Geordie: “Mick, Mick! You got to come and hear this bloke play; I found him in New York!”

“I don’t need to go into the shop, Chas,” replied Mick in droll Cockney, “I can hear ’im from ’ere,” which he certainly could – a restlessly remarkable, eerily savage sound emanating from within. This was the afternoon of 22 September 1966, Jimi Hendrix’s first full day in England.

Eve’s is one of the many stories not included in the biopic Jimi: All Is by My Side, narrating the life of unarguably the greatest guitarist and blues magician of all time, as he left New York for London.

Hendrix had arrived aboard a Pan Am flight, little known in his own country and a stranger to London. He had been born of Native and African-American blood in Seattle to a poor father who cared moderately for his son and a mother whom he adored but barely knew, and who died when Jimi was fifteen.

He had joined the 101st Airborne Division of the US Army to avoid a jail sentence for car theft (under a judge’s ruling) but hated the army immediately. A regimental report read: “Individual is unable to conform to military rules and regulations.” It is important, says Paul Gilroy, a historian of black culture, to see Hendrix as an ex-paratrooper who gradually became an advocate of peace.

Hendrix collected a small coterie of dazzled admirers in New York, among them John Cale of the Velvet Underground who, after playing a concert with Patti Smith in Paris last week, recalled going down into a dive bar in Sullivan Street to see Hendrix play during the mid-60s. “There was this fella heckling him all the way through, giving him gyp until Hendrix said, ‘I see we’ve got Polly Parrot in the house tonight.’ He got no trouble after that.”

Hendrix also amazed Chandler at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village one night, enough to fly him to London where the hunger for blues was inexplicably greater than in America. “Black American music got nowhere near white AM radio,” says the man who met Hendrix at Heathrow, Tony Garland, who would manage Hendrix’s British company, Anim. “And Jimi was too white for black radio. Here, there were a lot of white guys listening to blues from America and wanting to sound like their heroes.”

In London, Hendrix with his band Experience forged a new soundscape, stretching the blues to some outer limit of expression, ethereal but fearsome, lyrical but dangerous, sublime but ruthless. And yet, he wrote: “I don’t want anyone to stick a psychedelic label round my neck. Sooner Bach or Beethoven.”

This was not serendipitous, nor was it as effortlessly “natural,” as Hendrix himself often suggested, or even pure genius: Hendrix had found an alchemist with sound in the unlikely form of a sonic wave engineer in the service of the Ministry of Defense, Roger Mayer.

Mayer was an inventor of electronic musical devices, including the Octavia guitar effect which created a “doubling” echo. “I’d shown it to Jimmy Page,” Mayer recalls at his home in Surrey, “but he said it was too far out. Jimi said, the moment we met: ‘Yeah, I’d like to try that stuff.’”

Mayer left the Admiralty and thus began a partnership that changed the sound of sound. “And don’t forget,” says Tappy Wright, who had been a roadie but joined the management team, “these were no Fenders or Stratocasters. These were Hofners we bought for a few quid. Very basic but stretched to the fucking limit.”

Mayer is fascinating on the science of the sound: “When you listen to Hendrix, you are listening to music in its pure form. . . . The input from the player projects forward the equivalent of electronic shadow dancing so that what happens derives from the original sound and modifies what is being played. But nothing can be predictive . . . if you throw a pebble into a lake, you have no way of predicting the ripples. It depends how you throw the stone, or the wind.”

Casting this magic around working men’s clubs in the north of England, and opening for the Walker Brothers and Engelbert Humperdinck, Hendrix forged his furrow with what Gilroy calls “transgressions of redundant musical and racial rules.”

“He would take from blues, jazz only Coltrane could play in that way,” says Keith Altham, a reporter for the New Musical Express, who became a kind of embedded Hendrix correspondent. “And Dylan was the greatest influence. But he’d listen to Mozart, he’d read sci-fi, and it would all go through his head and come out as Jimi Hendrix.”

Mozart, Handel, Bach, Mahler: influences which Hendrix listed in a collection of writings recently assembled by his friends Alan Douglas and Peter Neal to create the nearest we have to an autobiography. And appositely so, for Hendrix’s address in London, which he called “the only home I ever had,” with the only woman he ever really loved, was the same at which George Frederick Handel had resided in another era: 22 Brook St, London W1.

On the night he arrived in England, Hendrix met Kathy Etchingham, his match and lover. Her recollections are priceless: she remembers Hendrix buying music by Handel and jamming along with his guitar on the sofa. “People often saw Jimi on stage looking incredibly intense and serious,” she said over dinner in London a few years ago accompanied by her husband, an Australian GP. “And suddenly this smile would come across his face, almost a laugh, for no apparent reason.”

“I remember very well [Jimi] sitting on the bed or the floor at home in Brook Street; sometimes he would play a riff for hours until he had it just right. Then he’d throw his head back and laugh. Those were the moments he’d got it right for himself, not for anyone else.”

Except perhaps Kathy too: Hendrix wrote The Wind Cries Mary, her middle name, when she had stormed out after an argument.

Hendrix returned to America to record Electric Ladyland, during the making of which producer Eddie Kramer remembers “his wonderful, swaying dance coming off the keyboards [played by Steve Winwood], in a waltz with the guitar.” Hendrix then gave the name “Electric Ladyland” to his grand studio project in New York. And any suggestion that he had some kind of “death wish” is given the lie by his own written intentions to record there “something else – like with Handel and Bach and Muddy Waters and flamenco.”

Patti Smith remembers the opening party in summer 1970, from which Hendrix himself took a break to join her on the steps outside. “He was so full of ideas,” Smith recalls, “the different sounds he was going to create in this studio – wider landscapes, experiments with musicians, new soundscapes. All he had to do was to get over to England, play the [Isle of Wight] festival, and get back to work.”

Hendrix never made it back to work. He died in the street on which I was born: Lansdowne Crescent, Notting Hill. I’d moved a block away by the time I picked up the Evening Standard on the way home from school on 18 September 1970, flabbergasted by the news. The front-page picture showed Hendrix playing at that Isle of Wight festival less than three weeks beforehand. I’d been there; his searing cry against war, Machine Gun, was still ringing in my ears.

Back home, I changed into all white and waited for cover of darkness to go round to 22 Lansdowne Crescent, where Hendrix had died in the basement, swallowing vomit after a night out with wine, amphetamines and a German girl called Monika.

There was no one there. I took a piece of chalk out of my pocket, scrawled “Kiss the sky, Jimi” on the pavement and crossed the road to ponder the gravity of the moment and place. A man emerged and washed away my scanty tribute with a mop.

A new ballet requires weeks of intensive rehearsal in order to reach the stage, and if it’s not properly taken care of, it can become extremely difficult to revive. In fact, if it isn’t performed for a substantial period of time, and if the dancers on whom it was made start to lose their muscle memory of the choreography, then the piece can slip away altogether.

Last fall, American Ballet Theatre rescued an important piece from that oblivion. Twyla Tharp’s rigorously beautiful Bach Partitahad been made for the company in 1983, performed no more than ten times through 1985, and then vanished.

Thanks to the dedication of Susan Jones, a longtime and indispensable ballet mistress with the company – who was in the studio as Tharp’s assistant as the ballet was created thirty years earlier – Bach Partita came back to the stage. It was danced with astonishing commitment and panache by a new generation of dancers.

New Yorkers now have another chance to see this nearly-lost sensation. After playing Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater last year, it has returned to the space this month as part of ABT’s fall season in New York.

Back in 1981, the versatile and ever-surprising Tharp was on quite a roll with her own company. The Catherine Wheel, set to an original David Byrne score, played Broadway that year, and in 1982 she had a huge success with the sensuously elegant Nine Sinatra Songs. For her return to ABT (where she’d created the exuberant and witty Push Comes to Shove, a huge hit in 1976), Tharp chose a thirty-minute Bach score and choreographed fiercely complex, purely classical choreography for a cast of thirty-six.

New York Times critic Anna Kisselgoff’s delivered an enthusiastic review: “Miss Tharp thinks amazingly big here in every sense of the word,” she wrote. “For the first time, she has attempted a true neoclassical ballet whose movement is rooted in ballet’s academic code rather than her own modern-dance idiom with incorporation of ballet steps.” She later described the piece as “a treasure house of dance invention for those fascinated by formal intricacy and experiments with movement.”

Recalling Bach Partita, Jones says, “I think it was really Bach that drove her. She has her point of view about the music and how it should be played, how it’s meant to be. She was really challenging the dancers. I think that the hardest thing for them – aside from absorbing Twyla’s style and getting it into their bodies – was the speed she required. It was choreographed to a Heifetz recording that is just faster than the speed of light!” [The ballet is always performed with a live violinist.]

The original cast included three principal couples, seven soloist couples, and an ensemble of sixteen women. “Twyla was developing her relationship with ABT and was discovering more things about the classical vocabulary,” recalls Robert La Fosse, who was the youngest of the six principals. “She was pushing the balletic partnering to new limits and challenging us with movements that changed directions constantly.”

Jones, who rehearses many Tharp dances, often staging them for various companies, is passionate about this one. “I feel it’s one of her best pieces. The fact that it’s Bach, and that it’s all of these dancers dancing their hearts out to this one violinist who’s making this incredible sound – I think it’s exhilarating. I didn’t think this ballet would ever go away.”

The challenge of finding a violinist who could play the score superbly at the tempi Tharp required was one reason the ballet slipped out of repertory. Programming demands – ABT devotes most of its performances to full-evening, narrative ballets – and other company considerations also played a role.

But Jones always kept it in mind. She recalls a 1996 dinner with Tharp when they discussed what it would take to get Bach Partita back on stage. Little did Jones realize, when about fifteen years later that became an actual possibility, how complicated the process would be.

No visual documentation of decent quality was available to help jog Jones’ memory. There was a black-and-white performance videotape, but it was overexposed. “At center stage, there was detail that was missing from the steps that I knew was there,” she says. “It was a process of seeing the root step and dusting off the cobwebs.” A studio rehearsal videotape was filmed a week before the premiere, but afterward Tharp made some pivotal changes in the distribution of the roles.

Over the years, Jones would urge Kevin McKenzie, ABT’s artistic director, to commit to a revival of the ballet. Considerable rehearsal time would be required, however, and casting the many demanding roles would be a challenge.

On her own, Jones began preparing. “Around 2011, I thought I would just start looking at these tapes. In whatever free time I had, I started notating and trying to reconstruct the ballet. And I did that for two years.”

Finally, last year, ABT had a longer-than-usual rehearsal period, substantial enough for Jones to delve into re-staging the work for the dancers of today. Tharp herself was present at rehearsals regularly for four of the six weeks. “She was really involved in the coaching. She knew that it needed that,” Jones says.

La Fosse was in the audience last November at the Koch to witness the rebirth of Bach Partita. “The new cast at ABT is superb,” he says. “They have a better grasp at the technical aspects of her style. It was like seeing a whole new ballet unfold in front of my eyes. So many moments stay in my memory. I can’t wait to see it again.”

For Jones, seeing the ballet come to life again was “incredible, really phenomenal.” But now that it’s back in repertory, her focus is on keeping it in top shape. “Now that they’ve gotten it in their blood, now it’s my job to make sure that the edge is there, and that they don’t let it become generic movement,” she says. “It has to reflect Twyla’s style. It’s part of the life of any ballet. You have to keep it fresh and keep the spontaneity there.”

Vladimir Ivanoff, head of the Ensemble Sarband, sat down with Deutsche Welle to talk about “Passio” and “Compassio” – about suffering, passion and empathy, all of which play a central role in music and faith.

Vladimir Ivanoff (VI) “Passio” translates to “passion” and also to “suffering.” In its medieval sense, “Compassio” means “to perceive” and “to empathize.” With this project, we’re trying to sublimate suffering by way of music, transforming it into mindfulness – mindfulness toward that which is foreign, the other.

That’s why we’ve selected a repertoire with a lot of music by Johann Sebastian Bach from his two Passions. We’re pairing it with early Christian music from the East and Islamic music in the Sufi tradition. That means we have music from two of the three major religions of the book – Islam and Christianity. The three predominant book-based religions detail a path away from suffering: going through the tunnel of suffering in order to arrive at salvation.

DW How does that function in confronting various styles of music with each other?

VI We’re using various pieces of music that treat suffering and martyrdom in the tradition of these great religions. But we’re masking it: Bach is also sung in Arabic and Turkish or played in jazz style. Early eastern Christian song sounds out in jazz or Baroque style as well. Some listeners will be more familiar with parts of the repertoire – but the arrangements make these sound foreign. In turn, listeners may find unfamiliar repertoires more accessible. The alienating effect leads one to think, “Okay, it may be very different, but I can accept that because I’ve noticed that what I thought I knew is entirely foreign to me.”

DW In the project, instruments of various cultures are played, with their widely divergent voices and technical possibilities. How does it fit together?

VI That’s the nice thing about art – in it, you can achieve the impossible. We have a jazz string quartet on stage that also performs as a classical string quartet. On the one hand, we have a Western harpsichord, and on the other, the qanun from the Arab and Turkish realms, which has been described as a Middle Eastern piano. Then we have jazz saxophone along with Arab and Turkish long-necked flutes. Then of course – and very importantly – there is one male and one female singer. Mustafa Doğan Dikmen, our male vocalist, is one of the great specialists in classical Ottoman music and sometimes sings Bach in Turkish. The female singer, Fadia el-Hage, is from Lebanon and studied in Germany. The program reflects her own multicultural background.

VI They perform dance-like movements, but they’re not dancers. They’re from the Mevlevi Order, a lay association. Since their youth, they’ve met once or twice a week to dress in ritual costume and swirl to music. The goal is to reach a state of absolute inner clarity. At the concert, these Mevlevi dervishes will whirl twice for about twenty minutes uninterrupted to jazz, Bach and Islamic music. As they swirl around, an indescribable feeling of community ensues – also with the audience. That’s what we’re primarily going for with the project: to create a community of mindfulness over the course of two hours. For me, the dervishes are like satellites of brotherly love.

DW So, the message is: mindfulness toward the other – even if the two may not really go together?

VI The Orient and Occident don’t really fit together! If they’re supposed to coexist, then you have to make it happen. But before communication can take place, you need mindfulness and acceptance.

We cannot isolate ourselves anymore. We can’t simply close the door and say, “Everything is good here, and it doesn’t matter what happens out there.” You have to work toward that. The beginning is easy: perceiving and noticing, “OK, there’s something different.” What happens then is up to the audience and to individuals. Ours is a call to work towards something both on the inside and outside. It’s actually a counter mission to all of these peace, love and blah, blah projects that send the message: “You can all go home now in peace; everything’s fine!” That’s not at all so! This year, I had to fight three months for each individual visa for my Syrian, Iraqi and Turkish musicians. Understanding is not greater. We’re becoming a bastion, closed off toward everything else. Fear is on the increase. Each individual has to do something to try and make things at least more bearable.